Supporting Under-Represented First Years by improving the transition into and the first year of higher education

Increasingly more students with increasingly more and more diverse needs are entering higher education thanks to changing demographics, policy shifts, and the rise of lifelong, flexible learning. These changes challenge support systems of higher education institutions. Despite efforts, different groups remain underrepresented whether for reasons of gender, ethnic origin, nationality, age, disability, family background, vocational training, geographic location, or earlier educational disadvantage. Once in higher education, students of underrepresented groups or from disadvantaged backgrounds have higher drop-out rates and lower success rates. Practitioners supporting students report needs in three areas: (1) Sharing initiatives with transferability—materials are often inaccessible, lacking context, and not easily applied elsewhere; (2) Involving all stakeholders—students are included in needs analyses but rarely in design or evaluation; and (3) Practitioner-led research—there is a gap in starting from practice and refining approaches based on real-world outcomes.

This project aimed to boost participation and success rates of students from underrepresented or disadvantaged backgrounds by improving how they are served, especially during the transition into and first year of higher education. Our goal was to build capacity in guidance and support systems through staff and institutions by taking a transnational, practice-based approach focused on transferability. Besides this focus on practice and transferability, we wanted support to move beyond isolated practices to systems. As such we aimed to analyze and map support initiatives exploring how they interconnect and link to other groups and/or initiatives. In third instance, we aimed to strengthen support staff by documenting appraoches, lessons learned and guidelines to evaluate and improve support systems and to involve students as active partners.

The SURFY project was implemented using an evidence-informed, stakeholder-informed and practice-informed transnational approach following the Lean Six Sigma steps resulting in four main activities. First, we looked at how institutions support the transition into and the first year in higher education by collecting, describing, sharing and mapping existing practices used to support the transition and adaptation processes of students, with specific attention to students from under-represented or disadvantaged groups through interviews with staff. Second, students and staff appraised the described practices for strengths and weaknesses as well as provided insights in needs covered and missed through interviews and focus groups. Students were further involved as partners to co-design initiatives, either to improve or build from scratch. Third, we distilled practice and policy recommendations for support staff and higher education institutions to build more supportive and inclusive support initiatives and systems through analysis of the practices and the student input. Finally, we translated our own institutional experiences, trials, and insights to transcontexual criteria, recommendations, lessons learned and support tools.

The project resulted in 7 concrete collections of outputs. (1) A database with activities to support the transition into and the first year in higher education of students, with specific attention to students from underrepresented groups or disadvantaged backgrounds. (2) A set of tools to evaluate and map support systems including (i) a format to describe and appraise initiatives, practices and projects with attention to transferability; (ii) an approach to map support activities into systems; (iii) a flowchart to support the evaluation of activities. (3) A set of tools to include the student voice including (i) an interview guideline to gather reflections of students; (ii) a workshop template to co/re-design guidance and support with students; (iii) a guide and 6 lessons to facilitate student recruitment and participation. (5) An overview of initiative and policy recommendations including (i) a gap/theme analysis of the database; (ii) transcontextual insights of students at risk; (iii) lessons learned and criteria for effective, inclusive support initiatives and systems. (6) A frame of reference including consulted relevant literature. (7) A set of recordings highlighting the key aspects of the previous outputs and results.